“Well, I don’t know what the world is coming to,” Poppy said, “if a man can’t eat three measly cupcakes without folks calling an ambulance.”
She patted his shoulder and walked out, feeling lighter than air.
During the period she’d spent with Poppy, the waiting room had acquired a whole different population. The blue-jeaned man had vanished from the couch. A boy in a yellow raincoat sat slumped in front of the TV. An elderly woman stared into space and bit her lip. Rebecca felt a distant, detached pity. When she dropped her coins in the pay phone and called home, she tried to keep her voice low so that none of them would hear what a lucky person she was.
* * *
By the time they got back to the Open Arms, it was evening and all the guests had gone home except for Biddy. She was tidying up in the kitchen. “Have some green-tea soufflé,” she told them. “There’s a ton of it left over, because none of the others would eat it. I shouldn’t have let on what kind it was. ‘Green tea!’ they said. ‘What’s wrong with chocolate?’ Oh, you had a phone call, Beck. Somebody named Will Allenby.”
Rebecca froze.
“’Green tea is for drinking,’ they said, and I said, ‘Listen.’ I said, ‘If you-all were not so prejudiced—‘”
“What did he want?” Rebecca asked.
“Pardon?”
“What did Will Allenby want?”
“Just for you to call him back, I think. He said you would know his number. How are you feeling, Poppy? Are you still having chest pains?”
“Pains? Oh, pains,” Poppy said. He was dishing out the soufflé, piling it into a bowl he had taken from the cabinet. “I don’t know why everybody had to get so excited,” he said. “I told them all along, I said—”
“I guess I’ll be going to bed now,” Rebecca broke in.
Everyone looked at her.
“Good night,” she said, and she walked out, leaving a startled silence behind her.
She climbed the stairs, went straight to her room, and sat on the edge of her bed. Felt for the little stick of paper under her telephone. Held it up to the soft yellow light shining in from the hall.
It meant something, she supposed, that she hadn’t thrown away his number.
He answered after several rings, just when she was starting to think he might be asleep. But his voice was alert. “Dr. Allenby speaking.”
“Hello, Will. This is Rebecca.”
But of course he already knew that, if he had looked at his Caller ID. So when he said, “Oh! Rebecca!” in a voice spiked with stagy surprise, it made her smile. She said, “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“No, no! Goodness, no! No, I’m just… I was just…” There was some kind of scrambling sound, a rustle, a clink, something falling over. “I was just sitting here,” he said, out of breath. “Gosh, thanks for calling back.”
“Well. That’s okay.”
He cleared his throat.
“Actually,” he said, “it occurred to me that you might have misinterpreted my question.”
“Your question?”
“What I asked on the phone last time. About why you broke up with me. See, it wasn’t a… reproach. It wasn’t meant rhetorically. I really did want you to tell me where it was I went wrong.”
Rebecca said, “Will—”
“No, no, never mind! I withdraw that. I realize I’m being tedious. Don’t hang up!”
She started to speak, but then stopped. Anything she could think of to say seemed a mistake. In fact, speech in general seemed a mistake. It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said finally. “Let’s start over.”
“Start over?”
She said, “Maybe you would like to come here for dinner some night.”
She heard a caught breath, a kind of exclamation point in the airwaves. Then he said, “I would love to come to dinner.”
“Are you free, um…” She cursed tomorrow’s engagement party — the first Open Arms event in over a week. “Are you free Wednesday?”
“Wednesday would be wonderful.”
“Fine, let’s say six p.m. Now, here’s how to get to my house.”
She gave the directions with such assurance that she probably took him aback, because he responded with a meek “All right… all right…” And after she had finished, there seemed nothing more to talk about. “Till Wednesday, then!” she told him.
“Yes, all right… goodbye,” he said.
She tried to remember, after she had hung up, whether in the old days he had said goodbye at the end of telephone calls. He surely couldn’t have avoided the word altogether, could he?
Then she went on to try and remember their first meeting, since recently, first meetings had begun to seem so significant. But it was lost in the mists of childhood. They had probably met in kindergarten, or perhaps some play group in the little park by the river. Really, Will had just always been there.
Which had its own significance, she thought.
Outside, a wind was blowing up, buckling the warped black screens and wafting the gauze curtains almost horizontal. The air smelled of rain and damp earth. The room took on an eerie, greenish glow. A door slammed somewhere downstairs, and Rebecca felt almost afloat with the sense of possibility.
Seven
You’ll never in a million years guess who I’ve asked to dinner,” Rebecca told her mother on the phone.
“Who’s that, dear?”
“Oh, nobody but Will Allenby.”
“Will Allenby! Are you serious? My stars! How did this come about?”
“We just happened to talk on the phone a little while ago.”
“My Lord in heaven! Tell me everything,” her mother ordered. “Every last detail.”
“There’s nothing to tell, really. I had supper with him a few weeks back, and tomorrow night he’s coming to my house. He’s living in Macadam. He’s head of the physics department.”
“Is he single? Or what.”
“He’s divorced.”
“Divorced! Poor Will; who’d have thought? Though divorced is much better than widowed, of course.”
“How do you figure that?” Rebecca asked.
“Welclass="underline" if they’re divorced, they’re mad at their ex-wife and so they put her out of their minds. If they’re widowed, they go on mourning. They feel guilty about remarrying.”
“Who said anything about remarrying?” Rebecca asked. “We’re just having a meal together.”
“Yes, but, you never can tell. One thing leads to another, you know! And you and he have all that shared past. It’s not as if you’re strangers. Oh, I’d love it if you married Will!”
“Mother,” Rebecca said. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. I’m sorry now I mentioned it.”
Why had she mentioned it, in fact? Almost the instant she woke up this morning, she’d had it in her mind to call her mother and tell her the news. It was like some kind of offering — a mouse she could lay at her mother’s feet. See there? I’m still the old Rebecca after all!
“What does he look like?” her mother was asking. “Is he as good-looking as he used to be?”
“Yes, but he’s older, of course. His hair is white.”
“That’s okay! What do you care! None of us is getting any younger. Oh. Rebecca. Do you want to hear an amazing coincidence? Would you believe I ran into his mother’s sister-in-law just last weekend at the Kmart? And this is not someone I see every day. Or every year, even! In fact, I’m surprised I recognized her. You must have known her. Katie, or Kathy; something like that. Was it Katie? No, Kathy. No, Katie. She was married to Will’s mother’s brother, Norman, before he died, and they used to live on Merchant Street in this darling little cottage that always made me think of a doll’s house. Do you remember that house?”